Facility managers try to prevent failures, but they still occur. Implementing a preventative maintenance program can reduce breakdowns, keep workers safe and save money. Planned maintenance includes adjustments, cleanings, lubrication, repairs and replacements. A CMMS can help facility managers implement and monitor the progress of a preventive maintenance program.

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What This Article Covers:

• What is a Preventive Maintenance Program?
• 7 Steps To Building A Preventive Maintenance Program
• Implementation Requirements

What Is a Preventive Maintenance Program?

It is a set of procedures, rules and tools for conducting regular and routine maintenance on equipment and assets to avoid failure and costly unplanned downtime. It goes hand-in-hand with preventative maintenance. Preventive care requires a solid blueprint to be successful.

One of the best ways for facilities managers to break out of their reactive maintenance routine is by implementing a preventive maintenance program. They can overcome the temptation to return to a reactive strategy and help the organization reduce unexpected downtime. In case you’re confused about which strategy to adopt, understand the differences between preventive and reactive maintenance.

With a preventive maintenance program, the road to reliability is easy. Preventive maintenance programs help you set clear project objectives and estimates how long it will take to achieve them.

Why Is Preventive Maintenance Crucial?

Effective facility management is built on a solid foundation of preventive maintenance. You can avoid significant and expensive repairs down the road by doing preventative maintenance on equipment and assets regularly. Simply put, a well-functioning preventive maintenance program helps minimize operational downtimes.

7 Steps To Building A Preventive Maintenance Program

Setting up a PM program for your facilities doesn’t have to be overly complicated. We can help you get the ball rolling.

Here are 7 steps that will help you build a successful preventive maintenance program.

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1. Establish and Prioritize Goals

An effective preventative maintenance program begins with a clear vision of results. Goals fluctuate from one institution to the next. Do you want to reduce the time you spend waiting for a response? Boost the level of trustworthiness? Save money? Make a list of reasons to implement a formal project management program.

Prioritizing your objectives is the next step. A preventive maintenance plan is a significant undertaking that you’ll have to add to your ever-growing to-do list.

It’s particularly hard to move forward with all your aspirations at full speed in the face of maintenance struggles. Prioritizing can help determine where to spend your time and money developing a preventative maintenance plan. Move on to the next phase of your strategy after completing these steps.

2. Inventory Your Assets

Once everyone is on board, do an inventory of the assets you plan to include in your preventative maintenance program. Your PM approach will benefit you if you closely monitor your equipment’s history.

Keeping track of asset data will ensure that your team doesn’t over-preventatively maintain one asset at the expense of others. As you fine-tune your program, it will also disclose maintenance spending patterns, workforce inefficiencies and the best timeframes for asset replacements.

3. Conduct a Criticality Analysis

A criticality analysis refers to rating the importance of assets based on their possible dangers. In this context, risk refers to the likelihood of failure and the resulting impact on an organization’s productivity, costs and public safety that may result from it.

Setting priorities for your assets will help you identify priority maintenance based on available resources. It’s important to prioritize tasks crucial to production/safety and expensive to fix or replace.

Equipment that is not essential to production or safety and has modest costs to repair or replace must have a lower priority than other equipment. Reactive maintenance is more appropriate for low-cost, worn-out and non-critical assets. The method appears simple at first, but it becomes much more complicated when you balance opposing priorities.

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4. Create and Measure Maintenance KPIs

It’s time to assign numbers to your goals now. You can only gauge the effectiveness of a preventative maintenance program by establishing specific goals.

You can use various metrics to measure your facility’s performance. Scheduled maintenance critical percentage, scheduled maintenance percentage, preventive maintenance compliance, planned maintenance percentage, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and mean time between failures are some of the most prevalent.

With a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), you can easily calculate these metrics with the help of preventive maintenance modules.

Next, you’ll need to build a framework for routinely measuring maintenance KPIs you’ll utilize to measure success. Preventive maintenance can only benefit from statistics if they are applied consistently. It’s critical to have systems and procedures regularly gathering, analyzing, comprehending and acting on data.

There are many ways to measure your progress, but one of the most important is to look at your strengths and shortcomings.

5. Schedule Preventative Maintenance

Now you’re ready to create a preventive maintenance schedule.

Do not attempt to tackle everything at once, as this will only lead to failure. Before breaking down high-priority jobs into short-term chores (quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily), we recommend preparing a long-term (yearly) maintenance schedule. If you use a CMMS, your PM program will become considerably easier to administer, monitor and change.

Operational managers can delegate, monitor and generate recurring work orders; track historical asset data in the cloud; connect with team members through direct and group messaging; and more.

Manage the supplies in inventory, provide feedback on work orders with automated alerts and glean cost-saving opportunities from advanced reporting capabilities using desktop and mobile CMMS software.

6. Train Maintenance Workers

Human error is one of the most common causes of unplanned downtimes. Workers who aren’t onboarded as part of a preventative maintenance program are likely to sabotage it, no matter how meticulously you plan. Provide staff with appropriate training.

In addition, create a preventive maintenance checklist for every job type with clear and concise instructions. You should also give your employees access to other necessary training resources. It’s essential to ensure they know when and how to carry out routine maintenance.

7. Monitor Preventive Maintenance Program Success

Keep an eye on your chosen KPIs, solicit feedback from your team members and make adjustments as needed. Remember that there will always be some downtime.

Tracking KPIs after the program’s implementation can offer insights into your progress. You can assess the need to alter your maintenance routine. If your team isn’t succeeding, perform a root cause analysis to determine what’s going wrong.

Implementation Requirements

Building a preventive maintenance program is one thing. But implementing it is a whole other ball game.

There are some essential requirements that you will need to ensure that your organization understands the complete picture of the program.

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1. Upper Management Support

While formulating a preventive maintenance program, ensure you have the nod from your company’s higher management. Take pointers from the steps below to assist you in gaining the seal of approval for your preventative maintenance plan, which is often more difficult than designing the program itself.

• Talk About Goals: If you want your plan to succeed, it must clearly state what you hope to achieve.
• Address the Current Situation: To keep your equipment in good working order, you need a preventive maintenance plan. Demonstrate how expensive reactive maintenance is by showing them all the issues you’re encountering.
• Explain the Potential Benefits and ROI: The ultimate goal of implementing a preventive maintenance program is common for all facilities — profit. Showcase the benefits of a PM plan by talking about its potential ROI.

2. CMMS Software

A CMMS streamlines and automates your maintenance processes. It is an essential tool for managing preventive maintenance work.

It’s tedious to create a preventive maintenance plan with Outlook and Excel. These tools won’t provide data, insights, alerts, missed schedules or finished tasks.

Preventive maintenance is a significant first step, but it’s important not to allow your efforts to go to waste once you’ve implemented it. To maximize the value of your preventative maintenance program, use a CMMS to keep an eye on it and control it at all times. Not to mention that CMMS takes care of all the grunt work for you like issuing notifications, duplicating PM schedules, maintaining work order history and so on.

Choose the right CMMS for your facility by knowing the necessary requirements that make a good system.

3. A Willing Maintenance Team

Preventive maintenance typically necessitates some alterations to the regular operations of your maintenance crew. Suppose your company currently sees maintenance as a necessary evil. In that case, your technicians may be reluctant to begin a new maintenance program because they previously lacked the resources needed to be effective.

Preventive maintenance programs and CMMS are essential to your success if your maintenance crew is on board. If you want to get the most out of your new system, you need to ensure that your specialists are motivated to perform and accurately report routine maintenance tasks. The system’s investment should translate into improving the maintenance team’s productivity in the long run.

Explaining how this changeover would reduce the frequency of emergency calls on nights and weekends, improve their workflow, and increase the safety and predictability of their job can go a long way toward using your maintenance team’s expertise and passion. Preventive maintenance plans become more effective when your employees understand the benefits they bring. You should clarify details like the duration to implement the plan, the roles and access for team members, and any changes to workflow.

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Conclusion

Preventive maintenance is a long-term process that takes time and effort to implement. A lot of planning is required, but the rewards are worth it. Setting goals, KPIs and triggers, discussing the plan with stakeholders, using the right technology to implement the strategy, and executing regular maintenance are critical steps in building a solid strategy.

To guarantee that your meticulous planning doesn’t go to waste, you must closely monitor your progress. Remember that a good preventive maintenance program is not an impossible dream for maintenance operations; it is a viable choice for everyone.

Have you implemented a preventive maintenance program in your facility? How has it affected operations? Let us know the benefits in the comments!